Re: RFC: Can FreeBSD stream Netflix?

On 6/22/25 19:15, Rick Macklem wrote:
>> You can get brower extensions that will lie about the user agent to
>> make it look like it basically any browser on any OS you want.
> Hmm. I'll admit that doesn't sound particularly legal or ethical and
> I'm an extremely
> honest guy.

Nothing unethical about user agent switchers.  It's commonplace and 
necessary sometimes, as some badly designed web software will check the 
browser's OS to determine compatibility.  I had to use this in order to 
work with Office 365 web apps from FreeBSD at my last job.  Otherwise, 
the functionality was crippled.  I try to avoid it, though, because 
telling web servers you're running Linux or Windows skews the stats they 
collect and fuels the "nobody is using FreeBSD" myth.

The problem is, Netflix uses a close-source browser plugin that is only 
distributed for a few platforms like Android, iOS, modern Linux (not 
RHEL, unfortunately), Mac, and Windows.  If it worked on RHEL, it should 
be easy to get Netflix working with our linux_base ports and a Linux 
browser.  There have been some successes getting Linux compat working 
with Ubuntu and similar distros, but it's hard to set up and maintain, 
so they never seem to work reliably.

Virtualization seems to be the most reliable option.

Would be nice if we could convince the plugin vendors to support FreeBSD 
natively (as nVidia, etc. do).

-- 
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